Sunday, September 28, 2008
Quote of the Day
"Oh my God, flying trains!"-- Julia, seeing a monorail for the first time. Hillbilly.
The First Few Days in Sydney
We made it! It's hard to believe that last year at this time I was sitting at srat lunch, frantically studying for the LSATs, and now I'm sitting in a Sydney internet cafe, planning a road trip to Brisbane. Weird.
We've been here 3 days so far, and generally spent them walking around. The first day we were all suffering from a terrible jet lag (Sydney is 15 hrs ahead of Chicago-- so am I talking to you from the future?) Nevertheless, we dragged our bodies to the Sydney Opera House, the Royal Botannical Gardens, and some art Museum. In the Gardens, we spotted a large winged creature that Julia identified as a wombat hanging in a tree. Wrong. A wombat is actually a furry, boulder-like, ground-dwelling animal, as an elderly Australian gentleman kindly informed us. What we actually saw are the largest bats I have ever seen-- like, the wingspan of my arm.
The second day was largely devoted to finding a grocery store, a feat in which I can proudly say we were successful . A bottle of coke= $2.50. A Snickers= $1.85. What a joke. If anyone wants to send us a Christmas present of chocolate, let me know and I'll gladly send you our address. Wine, however, is rather cheap, so we celebrated our supermarket victory by purchasing two bottles of Liquorland's cheapest wine and a rotisserie chicken. Twelve hours later, we woke up, one hour past checkout and sweaty with hangover fever. Turns out a). our tolerances aren't what they used to be, and b). rotisserie chicken isn't enough to soak up alcohol. Thus our third day of in the glorious land down under was spent in a darkened hostel room, reflecting on our poor decisions and wishing for Panera Bread.
Right now we're planning to rent a camper and head up towards Brisbane, stopping wherever we feel like. If there are no more posts on this blog, it means we broke down or got lost on the outback. Soooo....hopefully I'll post again soon. And hopefully people are actually reading this.
We've been here 3 days so far, and generally spent them walking around. The first day we were all suffering from a terrible jet lag (Sydney is 15 hrs ahead of Chicago-- so am I talking to you from the future?) Nevertheless, we dragged our bodies to the Sydney Opera House, the Royal Botannical Gardens, and some art Museum. In the Gardens, we spotted a large winged creature that Julia identified as a wombat hanging in a tree. Wrong. A wombat is actually a furry, boulder-like, ground-dwelling animal, as an elderly Australian gentleman kindly informed us. What we actually saw are the largest bats I have ever seen-- like, the wingspan of my arm.
The second day was largely devoted to finding a grocery store, a feat in which I can proudly say we were successful . A bottle of coke= $2.50. A Snickers= $1.85. What a joke. If anyone wants to send us a Christmas present of chocolate, let me know and I'll gladly send you our address. Wine, however, is rather cheap, so we celebrated our supermarket victory by purchasing two bottles of Liquorland's cheapest wine and a rotisserie chicken. Twelve hours later, we woke up, one hour past checkout and sweaty with hangover fever. Turns out a). our tolerances aren't what they used to be, and b). rotisserie chicken isn't enough to soak up alcohol. Thus our third day of in the glorious land down under was spent in a darkened hostel room, reflecting on our poor decisions and wishing for Panera Bread.
Right now we're planning to rent a camper and head up towards Brisbane, stopping wherever we feel like. If there are no more posts on this blog, it means we broke down or got lost on the outback. Soooo....hopefully I'll post again soon. And hopefully people are actually reading this.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Here we go!
Welcome to my blog! If you're reading this, it means you a). love and miss me, or b). are incredibly bored and none of the other, more interesting websites have been updated. This first post isn't too interesting, since I technically haven't embarked on my Australian adventure, but I thought I'd better get in some practice posts before the real thing. Hopefully this will work better than those long, boring, I'm-abroad-and-thus-will-recount-every-single-thing-that-happens-to-me-emails. I leave in approximately 15 hours: more exciting posts will follow, but to wrap this "test" one up, I'll leave you with a somewhat applicable quote I found in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
"The end he had been born to serve yet did not see had led him to escape by an unseen path: and now it beckoned to him once more and a new adventure was about to be opened to him."
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